Andrew Lyne

Education Lyne was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School, the Royal Naval School, Tal Handaq, Malta, and the University of Cambridge, where he read the Natural Sciences Tripos as a student of St John's College, Cambridge.

Career and research In 1991, Andrew Lyne, Setnam Shemar and Matthew Bailes reported that they had discovered a pulsar orbited by a planetary companion; this would have been the first planet detected around another star. However, after this was announced, the group went back and checked their work, and found that they had not properly removed the effects of the Earth's motion around the Sun from their analysis, and, when the calculations were redone correctly, the pulse variations that led to their conclusions disappeared, and that there was in fact no planet around PSR 1829-10. When Lyne announced the retraction of his results at a meeting of the American Astronomical Society, he received thunderous applause from his scientific colleagues for having the intellectual integrity and the courage to admit this error publicly.

Double pulsar In 2003, Lyne and his team discovered the first binary system found in which both components were pulsed neutron stars. Lyne's colleague Richard Manchester called the PSR J0737-3039 system a "fantastic natural laboratory" for studying specialized effects of the General Theory of Relativity. Other recent work that Lyne has undertaken includes research on the globular cluster at 47 Tucanae, whose dense stellar population acts as a nursery for millisecond and binary pulsars.

Awards and honours Lyne was awarded the Herschel Medal by the Royal Astronomical Society in 1992 and elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 1996.